Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism has announced the Honorable Mention recipient of the 2025 Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award for Poetry. This year’s honoree is Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi, recognized for her poignant poem, Electrocardiogram of a Mother’s Broken Heart.
The Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award honors works that reflect the lyrical power and historical engagement of Dr. Elizabeth Alexander’s writing. It celebrates authors who advance artistic, political, and cultural advocacy for women of color on national, transnational, and global scales. Bobi’s poem, selected by the Meridians Creative Writing Advisory Board (CWAB), will be featured in the journal’s spring 2026 issue (Vol. 25, No. 1).
In a statement released by the Press, the Creative Writing Advisory Board (CWAB) of which consisted Editor Ginetta E.B. Candelario, Maryam Ala Amjadi, Leslie Marie Aguilar, Abigail Chabitnoy, Floyd Cheung, Dawn Fulton, Anna Maria Hong, Tsitsi Jaji, Yalie Saweda Kamara, Nancy Kang, Adrienne Perry, and Traci-Ann Wint felt strongly moved, describing the Electrocardiogram of a Mother’s Broken Heart as:
“a poem that carries deep emotional weight. … It captures grief in an unexpected way and there’s an intimacy in the language that seems to contradict the clinical distance of the shape of the electrocardiogram and creates a striking parallel.”
A Nigerian-Hausa multidisciplinary artist, poet, and a Medical Laboratory Scientist from Bobi. Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi is the author of Cadaver of Red Roses (O Miami Books), winner of the ninth annual Derricotte/Eady Chapbook Prize. She has also received numerous accolades, including the Folorunsho Editor’s Poetry Prize (2023), the Labari Poetry Prize (2023), the inaugural Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature (2023), the Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize (2022), and is the first beneficiary of the Carolyn Micklem Scholarship.
Her work has been published in Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Uncanny Magazine, Poetry Daily, Agbowo, Poetry Wales, Torch Literary Arts, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. Her second chapbook, Uncensored Snapshots, is forthcoming with Chestnut Review (2025).
The poem will be published in Meridians’ forthcoming spring 2026 issue (Vol. 25, No. 1).
Congratulations Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi on this well-deserved win!
Bakare Oluwatobiloba
I write to educate, motivate and define history with literature. Just being me!
